The sound art of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on complex, unnoticed or unapproachable conditions and environments. The core element and method of his work derive from the use of sound recordings of the tangible aspects of intangible themes.

At the age of six, Kirkegaard made his first sound recordings, and in 1994 he began to create compositions based on recordings he was making. His works have since treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, border walls, actual and metaphorical, and melting ice in the Arctic. Since 2006 Kirkegaard has also been extensively researching, recording, and creating works using otoacoustic emissions: tones generated by the human ear. Two of his recent works are immersive acoustic explorations of global waste management and of processes that unfold when a human being dies.

Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, biennales and concert spaces throughout the world, including MoMA in New York, LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art and ARoS in Denmark, The Menil Collection and at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, The Sydney Biennale in Australia, Aichi Triennale in Nagoya and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Jacob Kirkegaard has gallery representation through Fridman Gallery (New York, USA) and Galleri Tom Christoffersen (Copenhagen, DK).
His work is in the collections of LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Museum Sønderjylland in Denmark, and Bell Gallery at Brown University, USA. Kirkegaard's sound works have been released on record labels such as Important Records (USA), Touch (UK) and Posh Isolation (DK). He is a founding member of the sound art collective freq_out as well as the not-for-profit arts organisation TOPOS. In 2016 Kirkegaard was the sound-artist-in-residency at St. John's College, University of Oxford, U.K.


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The Wire: Sitting amid the 8-channel audio, one hears incredible details, and there’s a timelessness that breaks from the sequenced motion of the video. It’s peaceful, even sensual (…) - the audio has a sharp, cleansing purity. It’s beautifully crafted, and the 8-channels create the sonic illusion of a depth and breath to the space that goes far past the walls, ceiling and floor of the room. (…) If there’s dread in hearing the environment swamped by the wastefulness of consumer capitalism, it’s that of the sublime. George Grella, 2021

The New York Times: The recording locations of the Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard are especially poetic: His albums have revealed the empty rooms of Chernobyl, the inside of morgues and the otoacoustic emissions of his own inner ear. Christopher R. Weingarten, 2020

Rolling Stone: One of contemporary sound art's most subtle, intriguing figures. More artistically minded than field recordings, more naturally hewn than noise tapes, Kirkegaard amplifies hidden worlds into evocative drifts. December 2015

Douglas Kahn: Kirkegaard has countered Duchamp’s dictum, “One can look at seeing, one can’t hear hearing.” Earside Out, 2014

The Wire: For all the scientific rigour to Kirkegaard's research into the sonic possibilities of various materials, his work reveals an underlying fascination for the mysteries and myths embedded in them. His work channels an access to an inner world. Anne Hilde Neset, 2009

AUDIO FEATURES

SOUNDS OF DEATH by Tim Hinman / Third Ear, 2019
On Jacob Kirkegaard's Opus Mors project

CLICK HERE FOR ALL COLLECTED AUDIO FEATURES

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EXHIBITIONS

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PERFORMANCES

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PRESS PHOTOS

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